hion?

The highest duty of a parent is to so treat his child that it will enter
upon the struggle of life prepared to obtain the utmost happiness from
it.

If anyone fancies I have been too severe in my strictures I would ask
him to read what Mrs. Gilman has to say on the subject of home. It is
true that she does not come to the same conclusion that I do. She would
have women economically independent, and she would have children taken
care of by those especially fitted for the task, leaving mothers and
fathers free to go their separate ways. But how could there be separate
ways so long as the slavery of marriage remained? Woman must be not only
economically free, but altogether free. As I have said, motherhood is
not an affair of morals; it is a function. Marriage, on the other hand,
is a matter of morals; and hideously immoral it is, too. Then why not
have motherhood without its immoral, artificial adjunct, marriage?

You see I do not ask for easy divorce as a solution of the problem of
marriage. I set my face sternly against divorce. I am one with the
church in that. I only demand that there shall be no marriage at all,
that there shall be no fastening of life-long slavery on woman. Let
woman mother children or not, as she will. Let her say who shall be the
father of her child and of each child. Let motherhood be deemed not even
honorable, but only natural.

Can anyone believe that if men and women were free to decide whether or
not they would be parents, they would not in the end, seeing their duty
in the light of their knowledge, fit themselves for parenthood before
taking upon themselves its responsibilities?

I would like to say that I have no fear of the odium of the designation
of iconoclast. Nor do I quake lest some one triumphantly ask me what I
will put in the place of marriage and the home. As well might one demand
what I would give in the place of smallpox if I were able to eradicate
it. I am not concerned to find a substitute for such perversion of sex
activity. If men and women choose to live together in freedom, fathering
and mothering their children according to a rule grown out of freedom,
and directed by expediency, I fancy they would be, at least, as happy as
they can be now, tied together by a hard, unpleasant knot. And if an
economically free woman chose to have six children by six different
fathers, as a wise woman might well do, I believe she could be trusted
to secure those children from wa